


Children of the Sun

by YesEunoia



Category: Call Me By Your Name (2017), Call Me By Your Name - All Media Types, Call Me by Your Name - André Aciman
Genre: Alternate Ending, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-10
Updated: 2017-08-14
Packaged: 2018-12-13 15:01:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11762385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YesEunoia/pseuds/YesEunoia
Summary: Does Elio keep his promise to visit when he's 45?





	1. Prelude to Symposium

**Author's Note:**

> **References:**
> 
>  
> 
>  • Ashkenazy playing Rachmaninoff's Prelude Op. 32 No. 10 in B Minor: **[[ here ](https://youtu.be/dE6vin5GPWA)]**  
>  • Böcklin's _Die Heimkehr (The Homecoming)_ : **[[here](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/03/B%C3%B6cklin_Die_Heimkehr_1887.jpg)]**

My mother died the summer I turned 40. Two evenings previous, we'd visited that place in the garden where we'd buried my father's ashes. She went there often, as did I, but rarely did we go together despite the fact that our love for him was our main connection to the other. They were man and wife, we were a family, and he was my father. Growing up, her role as my mother seemed more an afterthought, an add-on. This isn't to say I didn't love her as much as I loved him, I did, and with a ferocity that often scared me when I was a young child, it meant only that our love was different, a given, not something to earn or yearn for. 

She looked down at my father's ghost spot as I took in a deep breath, the ripe, luxuriant air filling my lungs. I looked everywhere but at the pool or where my table used to sit. There were days when I felt nothing when I looked at those spots, they were just another bit of the garden, some grass, some water, but other times some part of me knew that to look would be granting permission to some other part of me to grieve or to feel joy, anything was possible except feeling nothing, which was what I preferred today.

"We had such wonderful summers here when you were young, didn't we? So much beauty." My mother rarely cried so the sound of tears in her voice made me turn to her.

"We did." I said, "I have very few bad memories about those days. I'm lucky in that respect, I suppose." I didn't want to talk about this. Didn't want to wonder if I was lying about the tenor of my memories. I had not looked, I had tried to save myself from remembering.

"Yes," she said, her voice breaking again. "We were so very lucky that we were given those summers. But, I think, maybe, you were the luckiest." I didn't ask what she meant, but I made a noise that might have been agreement, but could also have been the opposite. She didn't ask for clarification and I offered none.

"He was my favorite, too. _Il cauboi_ , the cowboy." I froze. I couldn't talk about this, not now, not here, not today, with the air smelling the same as it did then, with the pool right there without him beside it, with my mother's breaking voice, the two of us standing at my father's ghost spot.

"It was a long time ago."

"Was it?" She asked, looking me in the eyes, and as tears spilled over, she patted my arm and turned back toward the house. I watched her, then said good-bye to my father, and followed. In two days, she did not wake up, and by not doing so, she would leave me alone in the world.

A week later, after the funeral had come and gone, after I'd placed her ashes alongside my father's, I sent Oliver an e-mail letting him know that she was gone, had left peacefully, and that she'd often spoken of him fondly. He and I had kept in sporadic contact over the years. Our correspondence always short and almost always concerning academic matters. Beneath our words, though, there was always some palpable tension. The kind of tension created by two people who are being careful not to speak about a debt owed, even though it is in the front of both of their minds. We didn't know who owed what to whom, or, at least I didn't, but it was important that we kept tabs on each other so that some day this debt could be paid. Paid or forgiven. He responded the next day offering his condolences. He'd been very fond of her as well, and still appreciated all she and my father had done for him. Did that include bringing me into the world? Did he appreciate how they'd allowed us to have each other? 

For three years after her death even our sporadic contact ceased. It was as if the loss of this last person who had known us then had caused the space between us to expand, causing time and distance to take on some unwieldy weight. As if she'd carried some of the burden of our remembrance, some portion of it that with her no longer in the world was then passed to us, and we found ourselves stuck and unable to lift it. Better to think that then to think his keeping in contact had been a gift to my parents, that that was the unspoken debt, one which he now no longer owed since no-one lived to collect- a kindness he had bestowed upon me simply because my parents had always shown _him_ kindness.

•••

One year, while in university, I'd taken it upon myself to transcribe from piano, Rachmaninoff's Preludes, Op. 32. I'd had the idea to make all thirteen preludes playable on classical guitar, which I'd started learning the year before. It was a near impossible task that came to a head when I began to work on Prelude in B Minor, No. 10. I'd decided to transcribe it from Ashkenazy's version of the piece, that version being my favorite interpretation. After a few days with my scorebook and the hot summer sun pouring through my window, I still couldn't hear everything or anything and my frustration grew and grew, the result was chaos. Without the missing bits, it was not only unfinished and indecipherable, it was also empty of whatever meaning drew me to the piece.

It wasn't until a few weeks after I put it to the side that it occurred to me that the parts I couldn't hear were the parts which, for some reason, reminded me most of Oliver. This realization rushed through me and I renewed my work with vigor, wanting to deconstruct everything about each note and each space between, so that I might learn what made it move me, what still made him move me. More than just his feet, his neck, this cadenza, Later!, the l'istesso tempo, the taste of his mouth after swallowing the peach. Was the secret of why I still dreamed of him somewhere in there? If it was, I couldn't find it.

I spent hours staring at Böcklin's _Die Heimkehr, The Homecoming_ , the painting which was said to have inspired the prelude. In it, a man, his back to the viewer, is sitting on the edge of a raised pool, the hilt of his rapier sticking out from the red robes of a nobleman, beside him a feathered hat. In front of him are clusters of lushly red and orange trees obscuring a house, of which only a small part can be seen- a bit of stone and wood and one window, lit brightly from inside. The man seems overcome by this sight, as if he is just returned from a long journey and though happy to be home, worries about what he may find beyond those bits of wood and stone, beyond that brightly lit window. Or maybe, on his travels, he'd used that rapier to defend against some insult, and he is now simply tired- glad to have survived, to have been the killer instead of the killed. Perhaps, he is simply taking a moment to compose himself, to tamp down whatever it is that he feels, so that he might walk calmly, coolly back into the arms of the person who lives there, the person who has been waiting with the light on. Suffice to say, it didn't help me figure anything out about the piano piece, and, in fact, it sent my mind down completely different alleys, none of which I particularly cared to visit.

One night, my transcription still unfinished, I went to the window of the rooms I occupied. The air was thick and hot, but smelled entirely different than B. had smelled when we sat by the pool, or reclined on the rocks, or on the grass covered in sweat. Suddenly, and out of nowhere, I wanted to climb to the highest point of the rocky mountainous cliff near my apartment. I wanted to go there and yell Oliver's name into the darkness, if only to hear it echo faintly back so that I could pretend it was him out there somewhere, or I wanted to jump off, leave the frustration of Rachmaninoff and Böcklin in my room, and finally allow myself to believe that my dreams of Oliver, of his fingers, his brashness, his star of David brushing against my lips, were simply premonitions of what comes after life. Anything could happen in such a big space; there was an overwhelming amount of possibility in so much nothingness. Instead of doing either, I turned from the window, called Abby and made a date with her for the evening. Dinner, drinks, and inevitably a return to my rooms to make love on top of the sheets, my bedside lamp casting shadows over our limbs. I would lose myself in her body, and her in mine, both of us knowing that the best examples of this act resulted not in losing, but in discovering ourselves, and in that feeling I'd tasted in Oliver's bed, and have tasted so fleetingly since, that feeling of coming home.

"I don't get why you spend so much time by yourself. It can't be healthy." She said the next morning as she brushed her teeth, up and down, looking at herself in the mirror, turning her head sometimes, looking at herself from different angles.

"Who knows?" I knew. It was because I was one of the two shyest people in the world.

"You're a lovely person, Elio." She spit into the basin and glanced at me before returning to angling her head. "People love to be around you. I know you." She did? Maybe she did. It wouldn't surprise me. I knew her. The freckle on her shoulder that I loved to kiss, the giggle she developed when she'd had too much to drink, her dark places. "You can't possibly want to spend so much time with your nose buried in your scorebook or in that Heracles book you carry around with you."

"Heraclitus."

"Heraclitus." She acknowledged. She was so confident that she never became upset or ashamed when she said the wrong thing. "Maybe you just want to spend all your time with your work. Okay."

"Nobody likes being alone that much. I don't go out of my way to make friends, that's all." 

She started to laugh - big, loud laughs that went on until it looked as if she couldn't breathe.

"What? What's so funny?" 

"You just quoted Murakami to me."

"I did?" I don't know why almost everything I said to her came out as questions. Most of my time with her was confusing, yes, a lovely sort of confusion, though not the kind that could be figured out socratically. It was more like visiting another country and getting lost on the short walk to buy something mundane and unnecessary, like beans or jam, and then happening upon something wonderful you'd never have seen if you hadn't been lost.

"Norwegian Wood. Word for word." She'd stopped laughing by now and was running her hand under her chin looking for something.

"I wasn't quoting Murakami then. He's translated." I felt some small triumph, like I'd won a race against someone much faster than me who had injured themselves a few minutes back.

"Okay, Elio, you silly goose." I smiled. I liked hearing his word coming from her soft mouth which had given me such pleasure last night. I thought in that moment that I loved her, all of her, starting with her mouth, then the freckle, then those dark places. Maybe I did. Who knows? 

Those few months with Rachmaninoff's preludes were, undoubtedly, the harshest months in my quest to forget Oliver. Never having shied away from holding up a mirror to myself, I didn't realize how much more difficult it would be when something, or, someone else was controlling the glass.

When I finally finished the transcriptions I was regrettably, but not unsurprisingly, no closer to figuring anything out about Oliver than I'd ever been. I had only ever understood when some part of one of us was inside some part of the other. So much of him was still left to be discovered by me, would maybe never be discovered by me. I thought, not for the first time and, like those times not with envy, about all of his former lovers. How many mornings had they watched the sun creep across his face, his thighs? Had they also known they were on borrowed time? Wasn’t every moment borrowed time? I never thought about his lovers after me or even about his wife, a spectral figure, enlarged in my head to a marauding pirate, a fierce lioness, The Madonna; I neither envied nor disparaged their life together. How could I? I'd seen him at the _orle of paradise_ , could see him now, his face covered by his hat, his toes drawing patterns in the pool. I'd kissed him before a backdrop of olive trees, laughed with him at the _Piazza Di Trevi_ while a man tried to sell us bouquets of roses, breathed his name and my name in early mornings before the heat of the day took its rightful place around us, had kissed him, our arms sweaty and holding each other at the _Basilica di San Clemente_. How could I crave mortgages and baby bottles, vows and car seats when once he'd looked at me by the lake, and his eyes, his _eyes_. How could I envy any of those other mundane things? How?

•••

On one of the last days with Oliver before Rome and before Columbia would take him back, we'd ridden our bikes to a distant part of my neighbor's olive grove. The air smelled like freshly shorn grass and we spread a blanket at the bottom of a hill. As far as our eyes cared to look, only short, humble olive trees, the space between them, and the grass surrounding them. By December all of the olives would be harvested and by next summer, their oil would sit in our cupboard and at our table. Mafalda would cure jars and jars of dark black olives in oil and we would eat them until the saltiness made us sick. It came to me, as was happening frequently, that Oliver would be gone by the time this particular crop was harvested, and I blinked my eyes and looked harder at the space between the trees.

We'd brought books and two bottles of wine which we drank straight from the bottle, each with our own. After an hour of reading and talking very little, I lay down and crossed my arms behind my head, feeling soft and happy, looking at the tops of the trees, breathing in the succulent air, admiring the sky. "You said you had an operation once. What was it for?" It was the wine buzzing through my body that made me bold enough to ask this question that I'd wanted to ask for weeks. I wondered if it would further embolden me to ask questions I hadn’t yet seen fit to ask myself.

"Hmm?" His brow was furrowed as he took notes in the margins of his book.

"Your operation. What was it for?"

He looked over at me. "You remembered." Then he smiled and I thought, drunkenly, _Of course he's smiling, I want him to. And we're the same._ I didn't say anything. "I had a brain tumor removed when I was 15. It wasn't cancer."

"Did it hurt?"

"Of course it did. Before we knew what was wrong, I had awful headaches, migraines. I blacked out playing football one day. That's when they did the test and found it. The surgery was pretty bad, but the recovery was worse. There were times that I would speak in French and not realize I was doing it. I can still feel the dent in my head." He was looking down at his book or maybe at his hands.

The tips of my fingers were suddenly tingling, itchy, my body suddenly electric and awash with something like desire, but sharper. They had gone into his head. Cut out a part of his brain. Why did that fill me with so much feeling? Did I want to be the surgeon or the bit of discarded brain that had been inside him? "Can I? Feel it?" He looked at me uncertainly and then shrugged. "Yeah. Sure."

I sat up and he took my hand, placing it on the left side of his head. "Press in a bit. It doesn't hurt." I pushed, momentarily distracted by the softness of his hair and yes, there it was, a bit of concavity about the size of a plum. I ran my fingers back and forth, dipping in and out, delighted and frightened by the intimacy of this act and amazed by this part of him that was no longer whole. "It took almost a year for me to feel normal again. It wasn't exactly pleasant going back to school with a huge scar on a shaved head, and I had some other difficulties, walking and such. The tumor won't grow back, though. They got it all." I removed my hand and looked at him. I wanted to stroke his cheek. "You could have died." I said. He must have seen something in my eyes, which was fine, because I wanted him to see it. Whatever it was.

"We could all die. At any moment. Besides, you're being silly. I didn't die. I'm right here." His eyes cut away. I knew what he was thinking, because he was me, and I was thinking the same thing, _But not for much longer. And won't your leaving be the same as you dying? Won't your leaving be like losing a bit of myself? Are you the surgeon now?_ The wine was making us both a bit maudlin and melodramatic, I supposed. I put my head back down on the blanket and looked back up at the sky.

"Here. Have some more wine. We're being too serious." He tilted his bottle to my lips- most of it landed in my mouth, but a few trickles ran down my face. His eyes darkened, and he leaned over, running his tongue over the trails of wine, down my cheeks, my neck, stopping occasionally to kiss my mouth, wrapping his tongue around mine. He tasted like my wine and his wine and my skin. I moaned into his mouth and pushed him to his back, deepening the kiss while straddling his hips. My hands ran through his hair, and I couldn't stop myself from running my fingers into that small hollow dent over and over. I could feel his hard cock against my thigh and I angled my body so that I could rub my own hardness against his. And as he gasped and almost desperately reached between us, for the first time I wanted to say, I don't want to lose you. I wanted to whisper, Don't leave me, Don't leave me, Don't leave me. Instead, I groaned as he rubbed his hand along the ridge of my erection and kissed him harder.

•••

The year before I turned 44 was a long one for me. My career had gained me a small amount of notoriety and I was frequently traveling giving talks or promoting my work. In November of that year, Oliver forwarded me an obituary. His wife had died in May. _In lieu of flowers, please make a donation to the National Breast Cancer Foundation or breast cancer charity of your choice._ I sent along my condolences and made a donation in her name.

Two years before, I'd moved back to B., deciding to make it my permanent residence, though I spent much of the year traveling. In the back of my mind, for years, I’d been thinking through my promise to visit him and his family when I was 45. Always the same questions, over and over. Could I feel nothing? Did I even feel something? Would I still want him? Would he still want me? Now the entire matter was put to rest, the question rendered moot by mutating cells in his wife's body. Oliver widower.

In June of the next year, he e-mailed me again. It was a short letter, a quick question about my small pocket of academia, and I thought, _Well. We're back to this. Okay. But why?_ I answered him in my usual manner, warmly, but with the appropriate amount of distance. I didn't mention the old promise and neither did he, and so, like time tends to do, my 45th year came and went. 

But subtly, and without my noticing at first, the tone of our correspondence began to change. It was still sporadic, still mostly about academic matters, but now, occasionally, we'd slip in something small about our personal lives: his new TA, Sarah, was a lifesaver, my last speaking engagement was a bore, he needed reading glasses now, my knee was making a strange sound, he was getting old, I was getting old. I filed every little morsel away, but didn't let myself dwell on them or on him. I wondered if he did the same. We were, at the same time, both more open and more guarded, tentative, like those first weeks that summer. Except this time, I was wise enough to know when we were flirting, even if we never acknowledged it.

I began to dream about him again, but unlike before, these dreams of the past, inhabited by a ghostly, supernaturally beautiful Oliver, did not make me sad. Instead, I awoke happy, like that feeling you have after running into a friend you haven't seen for a while, and you both still laugh in the same way, in the same spaces. When I thought about him during the day, which was still not very often despite our correspondence, I recalled things I hadn't consciously thought of in decades. Like how I'd spent hours one night while he slept beside me, moonlight and the sound of cicadas bleeding through the French window mixing with the soft cry of the sometimes breeze rustling our curtains, thinking of places on my body no-one had kissed or licked, of other places I had never stretched to see. I'd wanted him to see those missing places, to mouth those hidden spots that maybe wouldn't really exist until he did. I'd vowed to keep those places for him, to not let anyone else touch them with their tongues or mouth, and to never seek out my hidden pieces. I wanted him to know more about my body than I did, to, without his knowledge, tell him a secret that I didn't even know. Some of those spots have been breached since- a lover bent on discovery licking the space between the toes of my right foot until I pulled him up to my mouth before he could move on to the left, another taking a picture of me naked and lying on my stomach and showing it to me so that I would ruin the mystery of my thigh meeting the curve of my ass, I didn't know what to do with this piece of me that my eyes had been unable to reach, and that after being given to him, someone had stolen and given back to me. But even now, there are small pieces that belong only to him and places I haven't seen, and only when those places are all gone will I maybe wish that I'd thought to cut into some bit of flesh and had him kiss me there, in the wound, me offering him the inside of me so that I would know that long after the wound closed, he had been there, we had been there together, me opened up and him accepting the gift of myself.

When I received an e-mail in the fall of my 46th year asking if I'd like to have a drink the next time my work brought me nearby, I wasn't surprised, I wasn't excited, I wasn't anything. It was either a bad idea or a good idea, and how was I to know which it was? There were vast swaths of my life that, even in hindsight, I couldn't figure out. Why should this be any different?

I sent back a simple reply: Yes.


	2. Symposium

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aristophanes's speech in Plato's _Symposium_ talks about the beginning of the concept of love. It states that once there were three sexes, each sex having two heads and four arms and legs. Man (children of the sun) was made up of two men, woman (children of the earth) was two women, and androgynous (children of the moon) were one of each. Zeus went all aggro and cut everyone in half and left us yearning to be whole again.
> 
> If you've seen _Hedwig and The Angry Inch_ (one of the best LGBTQ+ movies/musicals ever) you'll recognize this story as the basis of the spectacular song, "The Origin of Love." You can see the clip/hear the song [[here](https://youtu.be/c3oSc8gMrGo)]

It was winter and the fire in my room was down to embers. I was due to fly into Boston in the morning and sleep was eluding me. I thought about rebuilding the fire, but instead burrowed further into my covers. After my mother's death I'd moved my parent's bed out of the big room and replaced it with my own. At the time, I hadn't given it much thought; I didn't want to sleep where my parents had slept, and my bed was comfortable, comforting even. I knew its sounds, which parts were firm, which had grown softer with age. I didn't think about Oliver at all, not then, nor about the long, decadent hours we'd spent there, pressing our bodies together, desperate, reduced down to desire and nothing much else.

But tonight, two days before we planned to meet for dinner, memories, long forgotten or filed away, came unbidden and in a rush. The afternoon I'd lowered myself onto his cock, my hands clutching the headboard for leverage as I moaned and rode him to a climax that caused white light to explode behind my eyelids, the evening we lay side by side as I entered him slowly, whispering, I don't remember what, into his hair, his neck, his back, feeling as close to complete as I ever had until that moment, the lushness of his ass against my groin as soft as the handfuls of Marzia's breasts which I had so enjoyed that summer, all of the quiet moments afterward, my head on his chest, listening to his heart beat and his lungs breathe as his fingers trailed idly back and forth over my back or through my hair, down my arm. Those moments were everything I'd never known to crave- everything smelling like him and us while the spectre of his impending absence was held back by sighs and tongues.

As a sharp wind rattled my windows, a different sort of memory entered my mind. It was the day before we left B. to return to the city that summer. The closing of the house for the Fall was always a busy time. There seemed to always be one last thing to pack, one more thing to remember, and Mafalda and my mother bustled around the house making sure nothing was forgotten. My father, as always, spent most of this time in the large room on the ground floor which he used as an office, ostensibly gathering his papers and books, but, much more likely, avoiding being roped into some task around the house. 

It was a difficult day for me. I was excited about the upcoming school year and beyond happy that I'd finally completed my Haydn transcription. But leaving B. meant leaving all of the places that Oliver had lived and continued to live, all of the places that we had lived together. I would also miss Vimini who had adopted me as her closest ally after Oliver's departure. On the days that she was well enough to go outside, we were rarely apart. When I worked at my table, she sat nearby reading, and she'd quickly become my favorite audience when I played my guitar in the summer heat which was taking its time to fully disperse and give way to the beginning of Autumn. That particular day Vimini and I were sitting in the garden on the edge of the pool. She was wearing her hat and my feet were dangling in the water.

"I'm going to miss you." Vimini said into our shared silence. I looked at her. She looked tired and pale, and I wondered what it felt like to be told that you were close to dying. I rarely thought about my own mortality and hers wasn't something we ever talked about, but I wondered how such knowledge must feel, coiling itself around every moment.

"Me too. Come on." I took her hand and brought her into the house, walking slowly so as not to tire her. A few days after I'd returned from Rome, Mafalda had mentioned some items Oliver left behind in his room. She'd tsked at his forgetfulness and said the items were in a box in the basement in case my mother wanted her to send them along to him. I hadn't planned to seek out this box, had barely registered the initial conversation, but my curiosity was now overwhelming. 

The path to the basement was mercifully free of both Mafalda and my mother, and when we reached the bottom of the stairs, a small box sat there. How could something so ordinary manage to contain anything of his? It made as much sense as me being able to hold anything of him inside me. He was an entire world, an entire galaxy. I took a deep breath. "He left a few things. I haven't seen what. Do you want to look with me?" I needed her there, a parapet against the incoming storm of this reminder that he had actually existed and been mine, and though I would never admit that need, her too-wise, too-old eyes looked right through me as she nodded. We sat on the dusty floor and I felt suddenly incapable of movement. Vimini must have noticed and taken pity on me. As she opened the box, I thought I could smell him on the displaced air, but I was, most likely, being fanciful, imagining him in places that he was not, places he'd never be again.

On top was the straw hat he'd so often worn in heaven. I picked it up and replaced the hat Vimini wore with Oliver's and she smiled. "Thank you." Beneath the hat was the items I'd asked him to leave, the espadrilles, his sunglasses, the red bathing suit, but there were other things as well, khaki shorts, a belt, grey underwear, a watch, and, quite shockingly, Oliver's Star of David and the attached mezuzah. I was surprised that I hadn't noticed their absence in Rome, but not overly- those last days had been whirlwind, full of heat, impending loss, and the headiness of being free from my parents and in the company of the only person who had ever known all of me.

"What an airhead," Vimini said, "Forgetting so much stuff." I nodded, but I knew he hadn't simply overlooked these things. He'd given me everything he was wearing that first day he'd shown up at the house, everything but his body, his skin, his limbs, his muscles, those being all of the things that I really wanted and couldn't bear to be apart from. I wanted to believe this pile of clothing and metal was like snakeskin- him shedding the person he'd been before stepping out of that cab onto our driveway, a message to me that he'd been remade, that I'd remade him, with my cock and my mouth, though into what, I wasn't sure. I removed the necklace from the box and put it in my pocket. My throat was dry, and I could not look Vimini in the eyes.

"You loved him." Vimini said suddenly and I started a bit. Oliver and I had never talked about love, had never even come close. We'd never danced coyly around the topic like lovers do, starting and then stopping, worried about saying too much, too soon. Our time together was so short, so sun-soaked, so full of desire and need that thinking about love would have, almost certainly, ruined all the rest of it. Why breathe life into something that couldn't survive- what futility. Besides, he and I were the same and because he had been unable to name the elusive "something else" which had permeated our interactions, I couldn't either. Even our ignorance matched. We'd been doomed from the start to stumble together through all of it.

Looking into this box that was all of him that he could give me, I decided it wasn't enough, that not even this possibility of my ( _our?_ ) love could transform his absence into something I could live with. "It's okay if you did. I loved him a little, too." Vimini's tone was one of consolation, but I did not want to be consoled. Not in this dark, musty basement, not newly saddled with the image of Oliver so far away, his neck bare. In Judaism, sins against another person are much worse than any sin against God, eased only if the person sinned against gives forgiveness. The weight of his necklace in my pocket felt like sin, and without him to forgive me, I didn't know how to move on.

"Let's go back outside. It's almost time for you to go home." We stood up leaving the box on the floor

Now, in the cold room where my mother and father used to sleep, I wondered if the box was still there, covered in decades of dust and full of the Oliver I had not yet met. Nothing could make me look. I wondered how many times over the years he'd been reborn, how many times _I'd_ been reborn, and if there was anything left of the Elio and Oliver who had known each other. Was this meeting with him some ill-fated attempt to recapture that which I still couldn't even name between two people who had died long in the past?

I didn't want to think about any of that so I let my mind wander to that last night in Rome instead. He'd taken me hard and rough against the windowsill of our hotel room. While the two of us fucked like animals in rut or heat, beyond the window, Rome bustled with activity, with promise, with that aching desperate fierceness that only cities and lovers know.

•••

The last time I saw Abby, she'd shown up at one of my talks and afterward we'd gone to dinner. By that time, she'd been married for two years, one baby down, another almost certainly on its way soon. I was happy that she'd found the life she'd always seemed to want. After more than 6 years together, that happiness on her behalf was the least I could give her.

"Can I ask you something?" She didn't wait for a reply as she speared a cherry tomato with her fork. "Who was it?"

"Who was what?" I was outwardly confused, but some part of me understood perfectly. 

"You know. The one that got away. I can't believe after all the time we spent together, getting engaged, talking about children, I never asked." It came to me that she'd set up this encounter to ask this very question. I wondered what was going on in her life that made knowing this now, of all times, so important. 

"There wasn't anyone _that got away_ ," I said sarcastically. 

She just looked at me. 

"His name was Oliver. I guess he was my first love? I was 17. I only knew him a few weeks." I had known him my whole life. I wasn't alive until I met him. We were born and reborn countless times in each other's bodies.

"Is he why we didn't get married?" I could tell from the way she fidgeted that she wasn't sure she wanted to know the answer. I didn't blame her. I wasn't sure I wanted to know, either.

" _We_ were why we didn't get married."

" _You_ were why we didn't." She rejoined with a small smile.

"That ends up being the same thing. Doesn't it." It wasn't a question and she didn't try to answer.

"Symposium." She impishly took a french fry from my plate, looking at me from beneath her eyelashes, and like so many times in the past, I was blindsided by how beautiful she was, in awe of how easy she was to love.

"Plato-o?" I asked slowly.

"You know. The Aristophanes speech. Zeus cut us all in half and now we're all trying to find that other person that completes us. He's your other half. You're a child of the sun."

"I wasn't when I was with you. This isn't about that. We didn't break up because you're a woman. I wasn't pretending." At that time, I'd told three romantic partners that I loved them and had meant it every single time. I wasn't saving myself for him. I lived a life open to experience, and my craving to bond with someone had never lessened, despite the possibility that all of those declarations were, not lies, but mere shadows of what I felt for him that summer. If some part of me, not any part that I consciously acknowledged, was waiting for him, that wasn't my fault. That wasn't the life I'd chosen. She looked sad as she took my hand.

"I know, Elio. I know. I didn't mean it like that. Forget I said anything." She took a breath and smiled with melancholy eyes. "It's always good to see you."

•••

Even though it was open to the public, I hadn't expected him to come to my talk. But there he was, in the back of the auditorium. Somehow, always more handsome, the years seeming to kiss him, instead of eroding him like time did to everyone else. We were all sandcastles on a beach, but he was somehow above that. Apparently that kind of thing was for mere mortals, not for him. I was mesmerized by the laugh lines in the corners of his eyes. Could I lay claim to any of them? Looking at him it occurred to me that I was almost certainly doomed- I just wasn't sure how. Was he my other half? Had we been cut down the middle, ripped into two bodies from one, cursed to search for each other? Had we spent all of that time trying to become whole with our bodies, when what we'd really craved was something deeper, a merging of souls, a singular life leading to a singular death?

After I finished speaking, a few people came over to ask questions or to praise some aspect of my work. I was grateful for their interest, as I always was, I loved talking about my work, while out of the corner of my eye, I followed his movements. He buttoned up his long coat and wrapped a scarf around his neck- it had been snowing all day. I began to gather my materials as the last few people trickled out and he made his way toward me. I had lived this moment in reverse. It was no less confusing on this side.

"Elio." He said. Almost 30 years and still, no-one said my name like that. "I hope you don't mind that I came." He grasped my upper arms and smiled.

"You know I don't. It's always nice to see you." I said, "Thank you for coming." 

Up close his laugh lines were even lovelier. I wanted to touch them with my eyelashes. I wanted to grasp his arms like he'd just grasped mine and instantly transport us to Rome. It wouldn't be the same Rome- I didn't want it to be. I wanted the Santa Maria dell’Anima, but this time with sunspots and creaky knees and laugh lines. We didn't have to be lovers or even friends, just two people who used to know each other, revisiting a place where they'd both been happy. 

"Is it always nice?" His eyes searched mine, and I felt off kilter, unbalanced. I didn't know what he was searching for and so didn't know how to answer. Then I remembered that he was me, and he would want the only response that wouldn't have killed me to hear from his lips.

"Yes. Always." He smiled, his laugh lines impossibly long, as long as the distance from then until now, from there to here, a meandering path of other experiences and lives that had somehow, by some miracle, brought us back to each other. 

•••

We ate lightly and drank sparingly. We talked about work, what books we'd read recently, if either of us had seen any good movies- we hadn't, and while small talk usually bored me, talking to Oliver about anything was always, had always been, better than talking to anyone else about anything else. In the quiet moments, I watched him chew, made mental notes about the spread of grey at his temples, imagined putting my arm around his shoulders which were still impossibly broad. 

He watched me, too, and I worried that he'd find me lacking in some way. It was the same feeling I'd had the first few days after he arrived back then. When all I wanted was to please him, for him to like me as much as I liked him. I didn't care if I was too old to feel that way or if I should have more confidence in myself, I'd long realized that love and desire are fragile, and make us fragile in turn, and that a certain power is transferred to the beloved and the desired. I gave it willingly and wasn't afraid that he had such power over me. We had chosen each other so long ago, and I knew every part of me was safe with him. 

"I'm glad you agreed to see me." He said as our dinner was coming to an end. "As much as I enjoy our e-mails, face to face is always nice." He looked cautious. I didn't want him cautious. I wanted him brash, swash-buckling.

"It is." The waiter brought the check. "Are you driving home tonight?" I asked. "The snow doesn't seem to be letting up."

"No. It doesn't."

"My hotel is 5 minutes away. A nightcap? Or 2?" I smiled, faking the confidence I wanted him to show. "If it gets too bad out, you can get a room."

His eyes darkened for just a second before they cut away. "Sounds good. I don't have anywhere else to be."

•••

The hotel I was staying in was painfully baroque and we laughed together at the pretentious columns in the lobby. In the bar we ordered a bottle of port and I watched the snow fall over his shoulder through the window.

"How long do you think we can do this?" He asked. He had a pained look on his face and I wanted to kiss him, wanted to savage whatever had caused him to look like that.

"Talk pleasantries and niceties when it's clear that you wanted to meet for more than that?" I asked. My heart was pounding.

"I don't know what I wanted. I wanted to see you. That's what I wanted."

"Well, here I am." I made some vague motion to myself and poured myself a fresh glass. I could feel the wine down to my toes. Warm and viscous. 

"Here you are." His voice was thick and if I knew nothing else in this world, I knew the sound of Oliver aroused. If he asked me, would I take him up to my room? And if I did, what then? I hadn't allowed myself to think about this during the mental preparations for this meeting. Would we fuck? Once? Twice? A quickie to get the desire that had been simmering for years out of our systems, a cleansing of the lust palate and then I'd go on to the next city in which I was due to speak, and he'd go back to his college town and never speak my name around his children? I didn't know the etiquette for sleeping with a former lover who was also a family friend, who also felt in so many ways like a brother, who was the only person I wanted to say goodbye to when I died. Is the aftermath hastily put on clothes in the middle of the night or strained conversation over awful hotel coffee in the morning? I didn't want to ruin what 17 year-old me had experienced and I didn't want Oliver to have to compete with his memory, but to deny that at this moment all I wanted was to taste every inch of him, drown myself in the sounds I can still hear him making, would have been a lie, an offense to whatever this was that would always be between us.

"Maybe, you're just lonely. Missing your wife." I was trying to hurt him. If I became the definite cause of his pain then I could, at least, justify the self-loathing I was beginning to feel for still wanting him, but I regretted the words the instant I said them. _I take it back. I don't care why you want me just want me. I think I love you, that I've always loved you, still love you. You could take everything from me and I'd thank you and try to rebuild myself so you could take it all again._

"I loved her very much." He said and looked me square in the eyes, unblinking, daring me to deny him something. 

"Even with part of me still apricating in heaven thinking about you, in Rome with you, in Vermont with someone else, in San Clemente, still, I loved her very much. But this isn't about her." It was strange and scary to hear him speak about love, thrilling and dangerous. 

I took a breath. "I'm sorry. She was undoubtedly very deserving and lucky to have your love. I can't imagine that you give it easily."

He looked slightly startled, "I don't know why you would think that." I shrugged. What did I want him to say? That he'd loved me, too? He said, "I loved you, too. I loved you." Now that he'd said it once, he seemed to need to say it many times. I didn't know what I needed. "I loved you, Elio. How could you not have known?" And some wall that I didn't know was there, though I'd spent decades staring at it, trying to determine its width, height, what it was made of, what I needed to be made of to scale it, to raze it, could I claw at it, would that make it crumble?, fell around me. It was intoxicating, it was like waking up.

"We never mentioned- it was only a few weeks- you left." I couldn't remember the last time I'd been unable to finish a sentence. 

"We both left. We had to. Still. I thought you knew." I looked away, at the table, at his neck, at my fingers, at the backs of my eyelids, "I didn't. I didn't know." It wouldn't have changed anything. It would have changed everything, my whole life. I would have been the exact same person. It would have made everything, that summer, and everything after, worse.

"I told you so many times. Just not with words." Had he? And if he'd told me not with words, had I also told him not with words? "I never stopped telling you." He said with some finality that I didn't understand.

"Did I tell you?"

He laughed, "You goose! Of course, you did. What did you think that last kiss in the airport was all about? Monet's berm? What did you think was going on?"

"Honestly? Sex. Lust. Desire." Why should a four letter word spoken decades later have so much power, be able to change memories, to erase the grass and the sky and the air where we first kissed, and transform everything into confession, confession, confession. I motioned to the bartender and ordered another bottle of wine.

"Those things, too. Yes, obviously those things, too. After we made love that first time, I told you that it was okay, that it was normal and okay for it to be just fun and games for you, but that it wasn't for me, and that whatever it was, scared me. It didn't take long for me to figure it out. You didn't need to know. It was one of the few kindnesses I could give you."

_Made love? Is that how you thought of it?_

"You gave me an embarrassment of riches, of kindnesses." I said fiercely. "I had that same feeling, of not knowing and being frightened. After the peach. There has never been a kinder moment in my life than that moment." 

Silence. Then:

"My older son lives in France with his wife. I think they're happy. My youngest son lives alone. They're both exactly me." He was changing the subject.

"Parallel lives." I said.

"Maybe." He paused, leaning forward, suddenly intent. "You don't understand. If they're the halves of my heart and if Rachel was the center, then you're the blood rushing through it. It's impossible for me to have loved as well as I have without that blood. I gave you so much kindness, because I loved you and I was thankful for every moment that you chose to spend with me." He was not changing the subject at all.

He did not blink, did not attempt to avert his eyes as he picked up my hand from the table, raised it to his lips and turning it, kissed my palm. Seconds passed, with his moist lips, and his eyes closing as his mouth touched my skin. When he opened them again, his pupils were dilated, his breath ragged, as if the feel and taste of my palm was as arousing as being inside me. He released my hand, placing it back on the table, giving it an abrupt pat as if he'd kept it longer than intended and wanted to assure me that he was not attempting to colonize my extremities, as if he'd surprised himself and wanted to assure me and himself that he could control his desires, when all I wanted was him out of control. 

I took a drink from my glass of wine, looking over his shoulder out the window. It was still snowing, bits of white passing by the tall lamps around the edges of the restaurant. I could smell it, ozone, sharp, cold. I turned back to Oliver, still so handsome after a lifetime, and thought that if this were every day, from today into tomorrow into the next, us, sharing secrets with our eyes, this wooden table between us, my foot close to his beneath it, our hands resting side by side above, if every coming moment was exactly his heat mingling with mine, if nothing else ever happened in my life, if, instead, I died within an endless looping oval of these seconds, it would be enough. It would do. 

But I was too full of Oliver and wine so I forfeited that perfect moment, taking his hand, pulling his head closer, so that my lips were almost brushing his ear and said, "In that case, please, no more of this. Take me upstairs. Please, Elio. Even if it's the last time." And his answering moan, which was immediate and satisfying, was also mine. "Okay," he said. "Yes." I was hard in an instant. Our fingers wrapped themselves around each other, entwining in some faint mimicry of what we wanted our bodies to do, as his pupils dilated, and he softly moaned again. "Okay."

We were a bit tipsy, and after paying the tab, we stumbled toward my room. In the elevator, we crashed against each other, using our tongues to fuck each other's mouths, our hips pressed together tight, his cock rubbing against my cock as we moaned, and how had I survived so long without this man's lips, without being able to pull away and look into his eyes as we panted our desire, running our hands everywhere? Was he real? Was any of this happening and if it was, how did it feel the same as kissing him sweating on our bed in B. while we pushed the stifling sheets away with our feet, his breath tasting like apricot juice and love and everything good anywhere, kissing while the rest of the house napped around us and the sound of Anchise hammering somewhere nearby reminded me of yesterday and tomorrow? We in our little cocoon and everyone else unaware of how urgently we sought to connect our bodies, to become one again.

Minutes, hours, days later, I undressed and came to him as the accused comes to their accuser, as someone asking forgiveness comes to their savior, as a penitent man asks repentance, for I had caused all of this, I had caused comas and parallel lives, this desperation between us was all my fault. I was sorry for the beginning, for the years in between, for this act which was possibly just an extension of my need for him when I was 17 and he'd enraptured me with his billowy shirt and his false confidence which was so like my false confidence- I had sacrificed him so that I could use him to ruin myself, to find myself, and I was so sorry. How could I have done that to someone I loved, had maybe loved from the moment I saw him getting out of a cab on a hot Italian day, yelling a dauntless Later!, skin everywhere. So now when he moved within me and panted his own name, his eyes searching mine, his hand reassuringly gentle on my cheek as if to banish my thoughts, as if to say you're forgiven though you've done nothing wrong, I found myself suddenly gasping, almost sobbing, whispering, Don't let me go, Don't let me go, Don't let me go, until, breathing into my mouth, he said, "Shhh goose. I won't. I never have. Just try and make me."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!


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